“It shot off like lightning into the bushes.”
“Are you sure it was an adder?”
“Absolutely. It had the zigzag markings on its head.”
He smiled at me. His face was triangular, his hair blond and soft, his eyes were blue, and the expression in them frequently intense and passionate.
“You don’t dare go there now, do you?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Are Geir and the others down there?”
He shook his head.
“Just Jørn and his little brother, and Eva and Marianne’s mom and dad.”
“Can I go up with you?” I said.
“Of course,” Dag Lothar said. “But I can’t play. We’re going to have dinner now.”
“I have to go home, too,” I said. “Have to cover my books.”
When we reached the road outside our house and Dag Lothar and Steinar went on to their homes, I didn’t go in; I stood around looking for Geir and Leif Tore instead. They were nowhere to be seen. Irresolute, I started walking. The sun, which was just above the ridge, was burning down on my shoulders. I cast a final glance along the road, in case they might have appeared, and then I ran to the path behind the house. The first part went alongside our garden fence, the second skirted Prestbakmo’s stone wall, half hidden behind the many slim aspen saplings growing there, which in afternoons throughout the summer stood trembling whenever the sea breeze blew. Then the path parted company with the estate, ran through an area of dense, young deciduous trees, came to some boggy land, at the far end of which was a small meadow beneath an enormous beech tree growing at an angle to a steep incline and immersing everything around it in shadow.
It was strange how all large trees had their own personalities, expressed through their unique forms and the aura created by the combined effect of the trunk and roots, the bark and branches, the light and shadow. It was as if they could speak. Not with voices, of course, but with what they were, they seemed to stretch out to whoever looked at them. And that was all they spoke about, what they were, nothing else. Wherever I went on the estate or in the surrounding forest, I heard these voices, or felt the impact these extremely slow-growing organisms had. There was the spruce by the stream, below the house, so incredibly wide at the bottom of the trunk, yet with damp bark and roots that became visible, like coils of thick rope, so far away from it. The way the branches cascaded, pyramid-like, to the ground, at a distance apparently stocky and smooth, but, close up, covered with small, dark green, perfectly formed needles. All those dry branches, light gray and porous, that could grow within the canopy of branches that were not gray but almost totally black. The pine tree on Prestbakmo’s land, long and slim like a ship’s mast, with red-flecked bark and small, green, lightly swaying whorls at the end of each branch, which didn’t start growing until very near the tip. The oak tree behind the soccer field, whose trunk at the bottom was more like stone than wood, but which had nothing of the spruce’s compactness because the oak’s branches spread outward forming a sparse vault of foliage above the forest floor, so light that you would never believe there was not only a connection between the lowest part of the trunk and the slender extremities of the branches, but it was also their origin and source. In the middle of the trunk there was something that resembled a grotto, as if the tree had bulged out to form a softly contoured yet hard and gnarled oval, the inner cavity the size of a small head. And the leaves, like all leaves, wherever they sprouted, repeated the same beautiful, partly curved, partly jagged pattern, both when they hung from a branch, green, thick, and smooth, and when they lay on the ground a few months later, reddish brown and brittle. Around this tree the ground was always covered with a thick carpet of leaves in the autumn, flaming yellow and green at the beginning, darker and softer as time passed.
And then there was the tree on the slope by the boggy land. I didn’t know what species it was. It wasn’t compact like the other large trees but grew out from four equally proportioned trunks, they wound outward, serpent-like, with grayish-green bark full of extended hollows, and in this way it covered just as large an area as an oak or a spruce, but the effect was not as magnificent, it was more subtle. From one of the branches hung a rope and a wooden bar, probably put there by the boys living on the road opposite, they lived as close to this place as we did. No one was there now, and I went up the slope under the branches, grabbed the bar with both hands, and launched myself. I did it twice more. Then I stood for a while under the tree wondering what to do next. From the house facing the slope, occupied by a couple with a small child, came the sound of voices and the clinking of cutlery. I couldn’t see anything, but guessed they had to be in the garden. Somewhere in the distance there was the drone of a plane. I took a few steps into the dried-up bog, peering at the sky. A small seaplane was approaching from the coast, flying very low, the sun gleaming on the white fuselage. Once it had gone behind the ridge I broke into a run again, into the shadow of the hill on the other side, where the air was a touch cooler. I looked up at Kanestrøm’s house, thinking they were probably at the table eating mackerel at this very minute, there was no one outside at any rate, and then I looked down to the path, where I knew every stone, every dip, every tuft, and every mound. If a run had been arranged here, from our house along the path to B-Max, I would have been invincible. I could have run along that path with my eyes shut. Without ever needing to stop, always knowing what was waiting around the next bend, always knowing where it was best to tread. When we raced on the road Leif Tore won every time, but I would win here, of that I had no doubt. It was a good thought, a good feeling, and I tried to hold on to it for as long as possible.
Well before I reached the soccer field I heard the voices coming from it, screams and shouts and laughter, as if from a distance, as if heard through the forest, there was something almost apelike about it. I stopped in the clearing. The field before me was swarming with children of all ages, many of whom I had barely seen before, most crowded around the ball, with everyone trying to kick it away, the hubbub drifting from place to place, backward and forward, in fits and starts. The field was dark, trampled ground in the middle of the forest, and it sloped slightly up on one side, where quite a number of roots broke through the surface. At each end there was a big goal made with wooden beams, without a net. One side was considerably truncated by protruding rock while the other extended across an uneven patch of large tufts of stiff grass. Almost all my dreams originated here. Running around in this place was bliss.
“Can I join in?” I shouted.
Every kick of the ball returned in a dull echo off the hillside.
Rolf, who was in goal, turned to me.
“You can be goalie if you like,” he said.
“OK,” I said, running toward the goal, which Rolf left with a slow, rolling gait.
“Karl Ove’s in goal for us!” he shouted.
I positioned myself carefully between the posts and started to follow the game, gradually distinguishing who was in my team, leaned forward, and was ready when the ball approached, and when the first shot came, a loose ball along the ground, I crouched down and took it, bounced it three times on the ground and booted it up the field. The ball gave against my foot, it was big and soft and worn, the same color as the sun-baked ground. The orange tongue flashed beneath the stitching. The ball’s trajectory wasn’t high, but it went a long way nevertheless, bounced on the right-hand side of the field, and it was a joy to see the pack of boys running after it. I wanted to be a goalkeeper. I went into goal as often as I could, nothing could compare with the feeling of hurling yourself at a shot and stopping it. The problem was that I could only hurl myself to one side, the left. Hurling myself to the right appeared to be contrary to the laws of nature, I couldn’t do it, so if the ball came on that side I had to stick out my leg instead.